Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!mnetor!seismo!caip!clyde!cbatt!neoucom!wtm From: wtm@neoucom.UUCP (Bill Mayhew) Newsgroups: net.micro.amiga Subject: Re: Any reviews of Digi-View yet? (or are we talking vaporware?) Message-ID: <245@neoucom.UUCP> Date: Mon, 4-Aug-86 23:25:41 EDT Article-I.D.: neoucom.245 Posted: Mon Aug 4 23:25:41 1986 Date-Received: Tue, 5-Aug-86 06:05:09 EDT References: <1492@well.UUCP> <1572@well.UUCP> Distribution: net Organization: Northeastern Ohio Universities College of Medicine Lines: 106 Summary: I saw it... The dealer near me carries DigiView. If I remember correctly, he is asking about $200 for it. It is basically a ADC potted in a blob of plastic that you golp onto the printer port. The ADC is pretty slow, so you need to have a still picture so that the digitizer can grab it in multiple passes. A low-res picture takes aobut 15 seconds per color to grab. The camera comes with a "filter wheel" somewhat crudely fashioned from plexiglas (tm) squares of red-green-blue-clear. I don't think that the filter arrangement is real long on color accuracy. Using gelatin filters would have been better, but probably would not have stood up well in the rough and tumble world of the home game market. A hi-res picture is b&w only, and takes about 30 sec to digitize. The dealer had a cheap-o Panasonic survailance CCTV type camera hooked up to the thing. I wasn't all that taken with the quality of the picutres we were getting. It was really difficult to obtain non-Andy Warhol-looking colors (I'll bet you wondered why Amiga World chose him, now you know). In honesty, the dealer claimed that our difficulties were the fault of the camera not being too good.-- I'm not so sure. All in all, I suppose that given the price, that the product is reasonable. ---- If the A-squared Live! lives up to what is promised, it should be a nicer box. I was told that Live! would retail around $450 or so. I talked to A*A last December when they were planning to have Live! out by this March. They claimed that it would be able to do full color picutres at rates up to 15 f.p.s. Sounds like they're using some exotic stuff, and I imagine that its going to need to hang on the expansion buss to do DMA. Last December, he said that they'd consider selling a wire-wrap version for $1500, but he wasn't too crazy about the idea. He also mentioned that they were planning a "professional" version of Live!, but woundn't mention details. I think the hold-up is FCC approval. ---- The dealer near me claims that the Genlock from C-A should be out around Nov or DEC. He claimed that C-A told him that the Genlock was supposed to be out now, but had to go through a second round of FCC approval because of some last minute engineering changes. Apparently time base errors in chintzy-cheapo VCRs would drive it crazy. ---- I got suckered into buying the sound digitizer from "Applied Visions." Its going for about $150 around here-- probably too much, but then I paid $1800 for my Amiga last October! Not bad. Futuresound lets you digitize sounds from 124uS per sample and up. You can allocate as much memory (in chip memory) as you'd like, so you can get some pretty long sounds: 30 sec or more. Of course, that takes so much memory, that you can't do much other than play it back. The sounds you record can be stored in proprietary format (essentially just a string of the desired bytes) or the two IFF formats. IFF permits a one-shot or a 3-octave note-style form. We fed the IFF output into "Instant Music" without any problem. Note that the old Musicraft files are not IFF. I'm thinking about writing an IFF --> Musicraft convertor. Applied Visions were nice enough to include C examples, header files, library, etc for playing back sounds in your own programs. They also have AmigaBasic sources on the disk. The main thing lacking is a means to invoke the digitizer from one's own program. I wanted to do some FFTs with it, and I'd like to be able to do the whole mess in my own program. I think they left out the input side, to discourage cloning of their box, as the circuitry is pretty simple. Speaking of the box, it plugs into the printer port via a ribbon cable, and has a pass-through port so that the printer can remain attached. The box itself is ~ 20 * 60 * 80 cm. A cheap microphone is included, as well as a line-level RCA jack. There is a volume control. The digitizer control program that is included is a nice pice of workmanship. It allows four separate tracks of sound to be resident in memory. An oscilloscope like window permits the sound to be observed. The window can be time scaled to assist in picking out chunks of a track for editing or saving to disk. The software permits some clever manipulation of the sound: Reverse, Copy, Mix, Zero, Scale. A very useful feature is the bar graph that indicates sound level. It has an instantaneous level, peak indicator, and clipping warning. Boy- clipping really sounds bad! With 8 bits, there isn't any headroom, so level setting must be done with at leat a little finesse. So far, playing around with Futuresound has been pretty enjoyable, and the product seems to do what it advertises. ---- Well, I guess that this is quite long enough. I tried to stick mainly to facts. Bill Mayhew Northeastern Ohio Universities College of Medicine Rootstown, Ohio 44272 USA wtm@neoucom